Goodbye, webOS

First off: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! …*sniff* now that that’s out of my system, let’s skip to the soul-crushing side-announcement today that, on top of HP’s desire to spin off it’s PC hardware business in its potential acquisition of Autonomy, the tech giant is also nixing its webOS operations, effectively killing the reason they acquired Palm for $1.5b a year ago.

It’s not like we didn’t see it coming, but I had been a bit more optimistic. I had even considered buying a TouchPad with the recent $100 permanent price drop, but it all appears for not. This is especially surprising given the executive shuffle in the branch, displacing Jon Rubenstein as the division’s head, and all the fanfare regarding their plunge into the mobile industry, all of this a mere year after their purchase of the struggling phone maker. With the ceased production of webOS devices, this year’s models being the lilliputian Veer phone and the TouchPad tablet, HP may never find itself in the mobile space again, considering how much this kerfuffle has cost them. This also probably means that the Pre 3 will probably never see the light of day.

To be fair, Palm has had a pretty rancid reputation as of late for poor hardware and spotty software, but the core ideas behind webOS, something that HP says they’ll continue on with, are easily the best part of the package. While we don’t know the exact details to the abrupt shutdown, it still makes me cry inside.